Chapter Two ♥
*
It was a warm day, and Daphne was already starting to get frustrated. It wasn’t totally fair to say that she’d wasted the entire morning. After all, you can’t know until you roll the dice that they’re not going to come up showing your numbers.
That had never made anyone feel better that Daphne knew of, and it didn’t make her feel better now. She put on a smile that she hoped would hide her sour expression, put up a hand to block the sun from her eyes, and stepped to block the next person walking by.
“Daphne! Back in town?” She couldn’t have said the man’s name who stopped in front of her, but she had vague recollections of a man half the size of this one, with a twiggy neck that tended to crane when he was thinking.
“No, just passing through. Do you mind if I ask you some questions?” The spiel only changed slightly to account for the fact that everyone in a small town knows everyone, and she was from this one. It was a long time since she’d been new to the job, and the routines were dug into her deep.
The man shook his head in exaggerated sadness, and then he shrugged. “That’s a shame. Well, either way. Go ahead, I guess. Ask away.”
“Hey, have you seen—” Someone brushed past Daphne, but they hadn’t made much effort to make sure that she was clear, and banged hard into her shoulder. They kept on watching with only a moment’s glance back. Not everyone knew her, she supposed. “Watch where you’re going! I’m looking for a man.”
“Well I’m available, if you’re just looking for a little company.” The guy waggled his eyebrows in a way that nobody would have found charming, even if he were fifty pounds lighter, and even if he were much better looking. But it made it very clear what he meant by the question, so that, at least, was a success. Daphne let him flirt. It didn’t matter to her.
“Not just any man, and not that kind of looking.” She went back to the script. It changed for every creep that she had to run down, but it didn’t change enough to feel like it was anything other than repeating a mantra at this point. “This guy’s not a local; he’s about this tall, dark hair, brown eyes. Wears his hair long, wears expensive shirts. Seen anybody like that?”
Her spiel finished, she waited for a response. The guy thought about it hard for a long time, scratching the two-day stubble and squeezing his eyebrows together. Daphne could see the instant he gave up from the slack in his posture.
“I can’t say that I have. Sorry. You give up on your man, you know where to find me.” He winked this time. At least he wasn’t waggling his eyebrows, she thought sourly. Another dead end, another wasted five minutes. It was easy to fall into the trap of thinking that it was all useless. But if there was someone out here who had seen Gabriel, who knew where he was staying, and she didn’t ask, then instead of kicking herself for wasting her time out here, she’d be kicking herself for not taking the time to canvas the area. Everything in moderation.
“Thanks, then. Have a good day.”
“You want my number?” The first really slick thing that the guy had done the whole time, Daphne thought. It wasn’t enough to change her opinion of him, but at least it was something that she could applaud. Everything else had been disappointing with the whole conversation, at the end of a long string of disappointing conversations.
“No, here. You can have mine.”
“Really?” His eyebrows tried to migrate all the way to where his hairline had been when she knew him years ago. He was young to have it receding, but apparently, not young enough.
“It’s a tip line. I’m not keeping it for 3 a.m. drunk texts. But you want to reach me, until I track down Gabriel Knowles, I’ll be accepting any tips that you can come up with on that line. I’ve got to go. Canvassing takes a lot of time.”
She let out a breath and turned. The conversation had been over for almost a minute now, by her estimation, and it was starting to eat into time that she could have been using to talk to someone else.
“Wait—you’re looking for Gabriel Knowles? You’re serious?”
“As a heart attack,” Daphne answered, without looking back at him. A woman was walking by, and if she had to say that Gabriel had a type, this woman was it. Tall, blonde, looked a little bit like someone who put out on the first date. “Really, gotta go. Hey—you! Can I ask you a couple of questions?”
“Daphne Coronet. We all thought you were gone for good.” The sound of her voice brought back vague recollections of a girl in high school. Her name was Kim, she thought, though she couldn’t have been absolutely sure.
“I’m in town on business,” she answered, the stock answer that she gave when she was chasing down a client. The fact that she was, in fact, in business for personal reasons, she didn’t think needed mentioning.
“What business is that?”
“I’m looking for someone,” Daphne said, keeping her tone professional. “You might know him, Gabriel Knowles? He’s not a local, but he’s a little famous.”
“You know the lead singer of Idle Generation?”
The band was popular, Daphne knew. But that didn’t mean that everyone would know the name of the band, never mind know the name of the singer. No, she usually gave it the way she’d given it to the last guy, a physical description with no personal details.
This woman, though, if Daphne’s hunch worked out, wouldn’t have been able to get away from Gabriel without being told, explicitly, who he was. And, for that matter, exactly what he would appreciate her doing to him, if she didn’t mind.
“It’s not about knowing him or not knowing him. I have to track him down.” She let out a sigh, the first clear sign of her exasperation that she’d allowed herself during an interview. “It’s a work thing, I’m not just getting his—”
“You could get his autograph, though,” Kim suggested, as if it were something that Daphne would absolutely kill to do. Projection, Daphne guessed. Well, in either case, that meant that Kim hadn’t run into him yet, because a girl with her looks would have no problem getting an autograph, anywhere she wanted it.
“I’m going to get a lot more than that, with a little luck.” The look on Kim’s face told Daphne exactly what it was that she had heard, regardless of what Daphne said. “No, not like that. He owes me—I mean, my employer—a good deal of money.”
“Who do you work for?”
The question was way too direct, bordering on being outright rude. Daphne forced the smile back into place, and put her professional attitude forward, and told herself that it was just a job like any other. That she’d taken two weeks’ leave to do it was just a little detail. “It doesn’t matter who I work for. Look, have you seen him, or not?”
“Not that I knew of. But then again, I never actually got to go to any of his concerts, so it’s not like I would really know what he looks like in person.” She looked genuinely upset by this revelation. Daphne ignored it, because it was just noise surrounding the answer she really wanted, an answer that she’d already gotten. No. Everything after this was professionalism and good manners. “The promo photos make him look eight feet tall or something.”
“He’s not that tall, trust me.”
“I didn’t think he was. But I—you’re not going to believe this.” Kim wasn’t looking at her any more, though her face had barely turned. She was looking at something over Daphne’s shoulder. It didn’t take a genius to figure out what was behind her. She steeled herself for a second confrontation. She wasn’t going to let anyone get in the way this time.
“Alright, then. Thanks, I’ll talk to you later. Gabriel, you son of a bitch!”
He made an effort not to look at her. The only thing he could have done to make it more obvious that he wanted to make sure she noticed that he wasn’t looking was if he tried to sneak a peek to make sure. “I thought I told you I didn’t want to talk. No, in fact, I’m sure I did.”
Kim spoke from behind her, having apparently followed behind. What did she think was happening here, and how did she think she could help it? “Oh my God, you’re Gabriel Knowles! This can’t be happening.”
“It’s an unscheduled stop. Miss Coronet here was just an excited fan, same as yourself.” He turned, looked Daphne dead in the eyes, and put on the smile that every celebrity learns to give, like he’d been hoping to see whoever he was looking at for a long time. “Did you want an autograph?”
He had a sharpie in his hands already. Daphne resisted the urge to slap it out of his hands. She wasn’t going to gain anything by getting rough, especially in front of witnesses. “I’m not going to let you keep avoiding me. You should know that by now.”
“And yet, I keep hoping,” Gabriel said. He was good at playing the sarcastic card, and he was sober now, so he wasn’t caught as flat-footed by her ambush. “Maybe this time, you’ll finally get the message, and I won’t have to keep running into you like this.”
“Either you’re going to get involved in our daughter’s life, or—”
Kim reached between them, shoved her phone case into his hands. “Who should I make it out to?”
“Kim S. I am, like, your biggest fan. I waited up until like, 2 a.m. to get your last album as soon as it dropped.”
His pen moved automatically, signing an illegible mess onto the pink rubber, with a short message that might have been legible if she’d handed him something a little more appropriate. He marked it with a heart, too. Kim took it back and looked like she was about to have a heart attack.
“Stop trying to avoid me, or I swear to God—” Daphne’s fists balled up at her sides. She could feel that same anger from last night boiling up, and this time there wasn’t going to be a blast from the past distracting her. If she wasn’t careful, she might blow her lid, and then she’d be up a creek.
“Threats don’t look good on you, Daffy, okay?” She cringed at the nickname, the flood of memories it brought with it stinging wounds she’d never given time to properly close. “You need to get it through your head: you don’t own me, and you’ve got nothing on me.”
Daphne marshaled every bit of her anger together, and tried to push it into a box labeled ‘discipline,’ hoping that she could change one into the other by trying hard enough. The entire speech she’d been practicing since she’d made it back into town flowed out naturally, better even than she could have predicted it would.
“Then pay me, like the courts already required you to. Pay me the money you owe me, and I’ll get off your back. You can go back to screwing blonde-haired groupies, or whatever it is that you do. Otherwise, I’ll just have to file an injunction with the court and have you brought in.”
“If you think you’re going to get me on that, then you’re crazier than I thought,” Gabriel said. He lowered his sunglasses back over his face as Kim walked off, still looking at her phone case lovingly. He let out a breath and spoke casually to her, dropping the bravado act for a moment. Even that, Daphne knew, was part of the act. “What are you seriously going to do, get me arrested? Don’t make me laugh.”
Daphne tried to say the worst thing that came into her mind. Even as she said it, it felt limp and hollow. She’d already lost the argument, and they both knew it. She couldn’t touch him, no matter how much she wanted to, because she’d be out of money before they even made it out of the first trial, and he could go for years. “How did I ever think you were anything other than a son of a bitch?”
“I don’t know, but apparently you did. Guess you should have kept your legs closed, huh?”
With that, he won. He threw it out like it was just a passing thought. His passing thought buried barbs in her so deep that she let him walk away. She slumped against a brick wall. She wasn’t going to cry, she told herself. She’d shed enough tears over Gabriel Knowles. He was just a bad memory, and a bad memory that owed her money. She was an expert at collecting debts. It was her job, after all. So why was this so hard?
She buried her head in her hands, her eyes stinging with tears that she stubbornly refused to allow to fall. She wasn’t going to let him do this to her, no matter what he thought. She wasn’t. But she didn’t know what the next step was supposed to be any more. She spoke to the wind and to God, and she knew that she hadn’t earned the right for either to actually listen to her.
“What am I going to do?” Her cheeks were wet with tears, now. Tears that she didn’t want to believe she was shedding. She wasn’t a good enough liar to convince herself that she was still okay. “Fuck. Even if I could get him arrested, I’d just be the psycho ex. God help me.”